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Dateline Glasgow:Another Gasification Plant Bites the Dust

Take note Barbadians, a 120,000t/yr plant failed to secure planning approval in Glasgow. What makes this case interesting was the proposed scale of the plant and the level of environmental planning AND the infrastructure to support air quality in that locale. The debate continues in Barbados whether gasification is the best technology for a 166…

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Denis Lowe, minister of the environment
Denis Lowe, minister of the environment

Take note Barbadians, a 120,000t/yr plant failed to secure planning approval in Glasgow. What makes this case interesting was the proposed scale of the plant and the level of environmental planning AND the infrastructure to support air quality in that locale. The debate continues in Barbados whether gasification is the best technology for a 166 sq ml island to adopt. The minister of the environment Denis Lowe and his Cabinet colleagues (including minister Donville Inniss) have been sold on the technology and a Cahill solution. But what do the experts say?

Follow the link:

The Waste Gasification Debate

While a number of major projects are underway globally, many argue that when traditional thermal treatment is able to achieve such high efficiencies, gasification is complex and unnecessary. WMW asked some experts for their thoughts on the subject

Glasgow waste gasification plant rejected

24 February 2016 by Luke Walsh , Be the First to Comment

UK: Proposal to build 120,000t/yr facility failed to secure planning consent

The South Street Energy Recovery Facility could heat schools and industry

The South Street Energy Recovery Facility could heat schools and industry

A plan to build a waste gasification plant in Glasgow has taken a hit after the developer was refused permission by the city’s council’s planning committee.

On 23 February, the committee went against its planning department’s recommendation of granting planning consent subject to some conditions, and turned down the 120,000 tonne per year facility.

Documents prepared for the committee show it received 950 representations related to the application for the South Street Energy Recovery Facility. All were against the project.

Developer WH Malcolm, also known as the Malcolm Group, wanted to build the facility on its existing waste processing site that is currently permitted to deal with 495,000t/yr. The site’s overall waste capacity would not have changed if the plant was given planning consent.

According to the planning application, South Street would process 120,000t/yr of waste that is currently sent to landfill. The site currently also exports refuse-derived fuel (RDF).

The developer had, when the project was first revealed in March last year, identified a variety of residential and industrial heat users up to two kilometres away. To receive government subsidies, Scottish EfW plants must meet a quality standard for combined heat and power (CHP).

In South Street’s case, this would have necessitated supplying at least 9.5MW of heat, on top of exporting an expected 11MW electricity.

It is another blow to the development of energy recovery capacity in the region following the news last year that a 1.5t/yr facility would not proceed.

Link to article

28 responses to “Dateline Glasgow:Another Gasification Plant Bites the Dust”

  1. Redfactor101 Avatar
    Redfactor101

    The parasitic load seema way out of wack on this project and about a third of the proposedacity of the Cahill beast.the other major difference is the Cahill proposal is for PLASMA gasification which is much more technical complicated and NOT a proven technology at this scale.

  2. Kammie Holder Avatar
    Kammie Holder

    @David, you think Dr Denise Lowe dont know that the same would happen to the plant in Barbados. He did not expect the backlash from the public or the Future Centre Trust opposition. We await his next move for its a game of Chess.

  3. Bush Tea Avatar
    Bush Tea

    @ Redfactor101
    Of course you are 100% on the ball that this whole CAHILL plan is bare shiite….
    But even idiots like Kellman and Lowe must be able to see this…
    Cuh shiite man, …except for AC and Alvin, EVERYONE and their cats can work out the abject IDIOCY of putting a micro ‘Sun’ in the middle of Barbados and asking someone like Lowe to manage it…..

    The plan is ….AND ALWAYS HAS BEEN…to come up with this exotic ‘plan’ – which. by the way, was ‘sized’ to accommodate the amount of kickback funds that needed to be generated, and to cream off a good number of millions before the whole thing grounded to an obvious and inevitable halt.

    But this ploy worked before…. Darcy is a boss…
    Do you know how much of our money was ‘expended’ on projects which NEVER saw the light of day…? Pierhead…West Coast Sewerage…Sugar Factory….Wave energy project…

    …and of course, Vincent and friends will jump up and down praising themselves for ‘saving Barbados from CAHILL’, and think nothing of the $20M that was spent on preliminary plans, consultancies, visits, finder’s fees, architectural and engineering works (so these technical people will not complain) etc….

    It is called Highway Robbery – but where the victims feel as though they have won….
    LOL ha ha ha

  4. David Avatar
    David

    BU remembers Senators McClean and De Peiza crying foul when Cahill documents were leaked to BU. They suggested that it was an act of treason. What is their position today?

    No need to mention the traditional media.

    >

  5. Well Well & Consequences Avatar
    Well Well & Consequences

    Wont even bother to comment on this one, it’s vexatious to the spirit, a whole lot of thieving politicians and their sidekicks.

  6. Redfactor101 Avatar
    Redfactor101

    From reading the docs it looks like very few people got paid for their services??
    Looks like most of the money was used to pay mortages and travel.everyone else seems to have been on a promise of payment based on sucess

  7. Hamilton Hill Avatar
    Hamilton Hill

    This is exactly why my mantra continues to be LONG LIVE SOCIAL MEDIA! Where are the so called journalists in all of this? How is it that Barbados Underground (a player in the much maligned social media) has time and again beaten the mainstream media houses in the breaking of stories like this one? This thing smells to the high heavens of corruption, plain and simple. Gotta Google Glasgow and see itssize

  8. Hamilton Hill Avatar
    Hamilton Hill

    Seems like even this phone don’t want me to cuss the BLP, cause it conveniently cutoff a part of my post. Gotta Google Glasgow and see its size in relation to Barbados. Other than
    a submission form David Gill about six months ago on brass tacks where he questioned the amount of water CAHILL would need in a water scare Barbados, where is the opposition in this scam? Just like VECHO this thing smells to the high heavens. Corruption!

  9. David Avatar
    David

    Andrew Hutchinson advises options were open about water. He suggested sea water is an option but of course this will ramp up cost. Surely Cahill is dead?

  10. Redfactor101 Avatar
    Redfactor101

    Sea water used directly for quenching the Syngas will not work!!
    It would require to be put through a desal plant.

  11. Hants Avatar
    Hants

    Cahill energy may not be building a WTE plant in Barbados.

    Last week, the Financial Times (FT) said Barbados was once one of the best run countries in the Caribbean, but was now “teetering on the edge of bankruptcy”.

    http://www.nationnews.com/nationnews/news/78403/brit-paper-debt-burden-region#sthash.humSzbEi.dpuf

  12. Redfactor101 Avatar
    Redfactor101

    @hants
    Cahill energy couldn’t build a bus shelter right now. It’s as broke as our country is
    We deserve each other.

  13. David Avatar
    David

    @Redfactor

    You should give Andrew Hutchinson a call. Believe you should be able to find the YouTube with him sharing the info at the second Cahill townhall.

  14. Hants Avatar
    Hants

    http://www.breakthroughenergycoalition.com/en/index.html

  15. Vincent Haynes Avatar
    Vincent Haynes

    Bush Tea February 29, 2016 at 7:59 AM #

    Chuckle……Skippah,last I knew you were in consultation with the BBE to rid Bim of the BBs…….so why yuh washin yuh mout pun muh…..we have known for some time that consultancy fees is a lucrative area of endeavour and the history of Bim is replete over the last 40 years that I know about of projects that have never seen the light of day despite a number of papers on the same project over the years…….this is Bim we like it so…..the new generation learnt from the old one and refined it to a speedier art….lol

  16. Sunshine Sunny Shine Avatar
    Sunshine Sunny Shine

    All the talk wuhna talking, Dennis Low Lowe pushing to get his Cahill deal. Too much at stake, too much to lose. Any percentage of 800 million is a massive pay day.

  17. Fred DE Frog Avatar
    Fred DE Frog

    With EPA’s existing power plant greenhouse gas rule stayed by the Supreme Court, the fight between industry and environmental groups over whether biomass is carbon neutral and can be used as a regulatory compliance tool is shifting to the nine-state Regional Greenhouse Gas Initiative (RGGI), where regulators are developing a post-2020 cap on power sector emissions.

    In recent joint comments, a coalition of environmental groups urged state officials to start counting GHG emissions from biomass power, rather than treating it as carbon-neutral, warning that failure to do so threatens to undermine the entire program and offset emission reductions by 43 percent.

    “Not counting bioenergy’s carbon emissions thus leads to a large discrepancy between reported emissions under RGGI and actual emissions,” advocates from the Center for Biological Diversity, Clean Air Task Force and Partnership for Policy Integrity say in joint Feb. 19 comments to RGGI Executive Director Nicole Singh.

    The environmentalists’ comments are in response to Dec. 4 comments from the Biomass Power Association (BPA) that urge RGGI to expand its current approach so that modified existing units that co-fire mostly biomass are also considered carbon neutral.

    “Repowering a formerly fossil fuel-fired [unit] to combust biomass perfectly aligns with the policy objectives of RGGI because it represents the direct substitution of a renewable and carbon neutral form of energy,” the BPA comments said.

    How RGGI eventually addresses the issue could provide a boost to one side or the other as EPA weighs how to address biomass emissions in its existing source performance standards (ESPS) as well as other regulatory measures.

    As promulgated, the ESPS allows states to use biomass power as a compliance tool as long as the biomass is “sustainably harvested” — though EPA has not yet defined the term and is struggling to develop a series of scientific formulae to estimate emissions.

    EPA has also said some types of biomass co-firing may qualify as renewable energy under the ESPS but has deferred the specifics.

    The agency’s Science Advisory Board is slated to meet next month where the advisors are expected to endorse a draft report from a special panel on how the agency should proceed.

    But any advances from EPA are likely to take some time as the panel’s final draft report recommends the agency develop a series of new measures and formulae to estimate carbon dioxide emissions from biomass. The agency is also holding a seminar in April to discuss biomass in the ESPS.

    Also, the Supreme Court’s Feb. 9 stay of the ESPS during judicial review gives the agency additional time to develop new approaches as it awaits a final outcome from the high court on the rule’s merits.

    In the meantime, advocates on both sides are stepping up their efforts to have RGGI overhaul its current biomass policy in their favor — in many cases citing EPA’s approach to justify their advocacy.

    Their advocacy comes as part of RGGI’s ongoing program review for aligning the program with the EPA rule, whether to extend the emissions cap to 2030 to align with the ESPS, and to consider what requirements to impose on other states that want to join the trading market.

    RGGI’s Emissions

    The RGGI effort is crucial not just for its policy significance but also because emissions in the region increased in 2015. According to recent data from ISO-New England, the grid operator in six of RGGI’s nine states, found that CO2 emissions increased in 2015 by 7 percent over 2014 levels in the wake of the closure of the Vermont Yankee nuclear plant.

    Patricio Silva, senior analyst for system planning, told the group’s Planning Advisory Committee during its annual environmental update Feb. 17 that CO2 emissions rose to more than 30 million tons in 2015, up from 28 million tons in 2014, according to RTO Insider.

    At the same time, allowance prices in the region have dropped — to as low as $4.74 per ton — in the wake of the Supreme Court stay, suggesting market participants do not expect a significant regulatory push.

    But environmentalists are urging RGGI to tighten its current policies governing biomass, charging that failure to do so will undermine the program’s integrity. And they are arguing that even EPA’s ESPS, also known as the Clean Power Plan (CPP), did not grant biomass generation as broad an exemption as RGGI’s current rules.

    “RGGI currently — and erroneously — allows states to disregard the CO2 emitted by biomass-fired [electric generating units (EGUs)]. The biomass industry has pushed EPA to adopt a similar approach in the CPP, but so far EPA has declined. In the final CPP, EPA indicated that a biomass-fired EGU cannot earn emission reduction credit (ERC) unless it burns’ qualified biomass.’”

    Additionally, an EPA list of ERC-eligible resources “does not include biomass combustion. To the extent that biomass combustion results in net CO2 reductions from the electricity sector, those reductions are significantly delayed, subject to considerable uncertainty, and exceedingly difficult to monitor and verify.”

    They are warning that 650 to 700 megawatts of new biomass generation capacity that RGGI projects is slated to come on line in the Northeast and Mid-Atlantic RGGI region by 2023 would mean 8.25 million tons of additional uncounted CO2 per year in addition to already operating biomass, for an estimated total of 35 million tons per year.

    Adding that to projected RGGI emissions from existing biomass generation in 2023 equals about 116 million tons, which is a 43 percent increase over the 81 million tons modeled by RGGI.

    Also, the groups say the “net addition to atmospheric carbon loading from burning biomass relative to fossil fuels can persist for decades.”

    The comments say that the initiative’s failure to accurately account for biomass emissions “threatens to undermine both the integrity and the potential success of the RGGI program. At the very least, therefore, RGGI should conduct modeling to determine the degree to which bioenergy carbon emissions increase actual power sector carbon flux.”
    The groups add that biomass plants in the region are burning forest wood, in addition to residues such as sawdust, and that sustainably harvested wood does not make it carbon neutral. They cite one 70 megawatt plan in New Hampshire that burns 113 tons of wood an hour — with part of it fuel supply coming from “whole log” clipping.

    “This is the amount of wood yielded by clearcutting more than one acre per hour of New Hampshire’s forests,” the groups say.

    Also, they say, RGGI’s model rule definition of “’eligible biomass’ is not adequate to ensure low net emissions as a short carbon debt payoff time.” Only one state, New York, has acknowledged the effect that eligible biomass could have on emissions that require a demonstration that the land from which the biomass came will “remain in a forested state for 100 years.”

  18. Bajan Yankee Avatar
    Bajan Yankee

    The country is broke because of thieving by the politicians since independence from Barrow to Freundel. #corruptbajanoliticians #Barbadosbankrupt

  19. pieter pieper Avatar
    pieter pieper

    If you think this country is bankrupt now, wait until Cuba’s tourist industry gets going ! It’s scary to think of the serious economic and social problems awaiting us ! Today’s corruption and crime will pale into insignificance compared to what is to come !

  20. Redfactor101 Avatar
    Redfactor101

    @fred t frog
    CO2 and carbon capture is the least of our worries with Cahill . the ability to contain the reaction is the major issue with alter NRG’s plasma gasifer. They will not guarantee or take responsibility for the syngas post exit nozzle of the gasifer.
    The EPC contractor (who ever that may be )will struggle to take the risk on the synfas ductwork and cleanup and will try and pass this risk back to the developer (Cahill) who don’t have a balance sheet or insuring capability to take this on.the uncontrolled discharge of syngas to the atmosphere is the biggest risk on this monster. This is tantamount to Russian roulette…….

  21. Bush Tea Avatar
    Bush Tea

    @ Redfactor101
    Plasma gasification deployment in Barbados would be like building a nuclear reactor up Hillaby. It is just TOO IDIOTIC to seriously contemplate.

    Look…
    The people had a plan to steal some money – a plan which was unfortunately (for them) exposed by BU. But to suggest that – even morons of the order of Lowe and Kellman – would seriously want to bring such a plant to this little island of brass ..is REALLY seeking to put them in the category of Hitler….or Alvin

  22. Redfactor101 Avatar
    Redfactor101

    Agreed however these idiots don’t have the Gray matter to understand what they were dealing g with
    Question is if they have seen the error of their stupidty why haven’t they taken steps to kill it officially an put energy into getting a viable waste management plan in place.
    If it’s dead then issue a death certificate for all to see.and leave the H bomb gasifer to the countries that have the techies to challenge it’s use in a way we can never do.

  23. David Avatar
    David

    @Redfactor

    Don’t you get it? It is about recouping political capital, there is a general election to be fought.

  24. Redfactor101 Avatar
    Redfactor101

    I get it

  25. Bush Tea Avatar
    Bush Tea

    …besides, how do they kill CAHILL officially without admitting the deals that went down? who would take the fall?

    Understand that the plan called for large chunks of $$$ from our Treasury to be transferred to Claire …who would have paid for her condo and passed on the required finder’s fees etc.

    Some malicious bloggers here on BU started asking questions …starting an avalanche and causing blockages in the Treasury transfers…. and putting Clare’s condo at risk….

    Right now REAL people vexs yuh!!
    ..people in possession of letters signed by ministers, PRIME ministers, businessmen etc…

    Who bout here got the balls to kill Cahill…..?

  26. Redfactor101 Avatar
    Redfactor101

    Re-read the documentation on BU
    Cahill breached
    Put her on notice of her breaches and terminate for cause !!!!!!
    If Cahill had to ” brown bag the minesters” it would have to be through tge EPC contractor or post commissioning of the plant. Or from the sale of the project to the likes of infrastar
    The only money I can see Cowan getting is the €650,000 from technip cashing in her RRSP’s and the remortage of her condo to ridgemount which it looks like she used to pay the first mortgage on a monthly basis and funding Cahill energy on a skeleton basis which if I read it correctly was expenced through Blenheim in Guernsey in its entirety .
    Ridgemount essentially own the condo with the first mortager .
    She has no visible means of income or revenue
    The government didn’t vet this woman or her shell company
    Put her on notice and sell it as her breach ……..

  27. David Avatar
    David

    @Redfactor101

    The Slider at the top of the page does the same thing. The ‘stickies’ required some CSS customization and we believe it affected how BU’s page was being indexed by search engines. It is about judgement. Believe that Cahill will not be forgotten.

  28. Redfactor101 Avatar
    Redfactor101

    Glad to hear it’s not going on the back burner.
    Cahill epitomises the MIS use of office and trust both at a government level and a corporate level.
    It would never have gained it’s notarity if the government and its unedited CO conspirators had followed the rules of governance and transparency .
    Keep pushing back !!!!!!!!!!!!!

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